Morgan Stanley's Latest IPO & The Reddit Revolt: How WallStreetBets Is Targeting Its Own Platform

Welcome back to the Weekly Deal Room, and as ever, I'm joined by Stephen, our Director of Corporate Finance, to chew over some of the real stories happening in the world of corporate finance. If this is your first time listening, we hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please do leave us a rating or a comment depending on what platform you use to listen. If you're a regular listener, make sure you hit the follow button and also hit the bell icon so you get notified of all the forthcoming episodes as they come out. And do share this with a friend. I was on campus, uh, yesterday, and there was a couple people in the room that were using it and a few that weren't. And so look, let's share the love. Let's get this out to as many people as possible. So if you find it beneficial, the aim of these, of course, is to bring finance to life and actually talk about theory but in an applied way to real deals that are happening right now. So yeah, We'd love to have more people involved in the community.

You know what I would like to see, Ant? I would like to see people at dinner table discussing the latest podcast, you know, family, mother, father, kids, just getting around and going, all right, what was it that Ant said about Shein this week? And what are the IPO prospects for the London Stock Exchange? Yeah, I can see this happening. Nice fire in the corner, glass of wine. Let's make it happen.

Well, yeah, I mean, whilst my daughter's saying, Dad, can I get that top off Shein? I can say, well, did you know? So look, there's a little something in there for everyone. But yeah, let's, uh, let me give you an overview first of what we're going to discuss in this episode, and then we can dive into the first topic. So we're going to talk a little bit about Morgan Stanley's, one of the major US investment banks. Their wealth management arm is giving its clients a chance to buy and sell quite coveted shares of private companies before they're available to the wider public. So again, this kind of leads into discussions about IPO, but interestingly, how does that process I've just mentioned work? We're then going to talk again a little bit of MS Special here. They are our global partner after all. So at the moment, a bank group spearheaded by Morgan Stanley are in discussions with Elon Musk and his team about refinancing a particularly large packet of debt, uh, that supported the takeover of the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. So we'll have a look at that. And then Reddit— you've probably heard about this story, you might have even been part of the WallStreetBets forum— which, this is where it gets a particularly interesting story because there's an update on the IPO which we can cover, Stephen will go through, but also about the very in finance forum that, that brought, uh, I guess Reddit right into the spotlight a few years ago, could well be something to keep an eye on as and when this company goes public, and we'll explain why. And then finally, Alibaba, the Chinese company, is leading a financing round of at least $600 million for Chinese AI startup Minimax, which we'll have a look at as well. So yeah, Stephen, so this situation at Morgan Stanley. What is happening with the IPO market?

Yeah, this is a great story and I think it's two-pronged. I'm going to talk about Morgan Stanley, but I'm also going to talk about Jeremy Hunt as well, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, because there's two elements to this pre-IPO secondary market story. And I think we'll take it through a little bit of history. Actually, we'll start from the beginning. So, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, companies tended to IPO, to go public a lot earlier at the earlier stages of their value creation cycle. You know, reasons for that were relatively obvious. There was not as much private capital out there, venture capital and private equity and large high net worth individuals and institutional investors. We're not going that far down the food chain. So the likes of Amazon had to IPO at a valuation of $300 million, right? Wow.

That's crazy.

Do you want to know what it's, uh, if you had invested in Amazon's IPO at a $300 million market capitalization, what would your returns be? And who's the math?

My returns be, that is the biggest missed. I'm feeling FOMO. Flowing through my veins because it's got to be in, in the multiple thousands, I'm sure.

Yeah, I mean, 6,133x returns. I would not be doing—

Dad, why didn't you buy me some of the stock when I was a teen? Come on, Dad.

I would say, yeah, I would say I would no longer be doing this podcast, but I probably would still be doing this podcast, but I would also be sponsoring this podcast as well with some, you know, harebrained scheme that I've got with, with my, with my Amazon winnings. But the same, you know, the same went for Tesla, $1.7 billion IPO. Compare that with the Rivian IPO a couple of years ago of $60 plus, $50 plus billion. Google IPO, $23 billion. That was still a, that was a mega IPO, but still not massive. And obviously Apple's IPO in 1980 at $1.8 billion. So what's happened is as more private capital has flooded into the market, especially for early stage technology companies. These early-stage technology companies have been able to go longer and longer and longer before listing, before the call of the IPO, which is fine from their perspective because the longer you stay private, the less scrutiny you have, the less quarterly reporting cycle you have to put up with, et cetera, et cetera. The issue is that for the majority of investors, whether you are a pension fund or whether you are a retail investor, you've got very strict limits on what you can and can't invest in. Many pension funds can only invest in certain asset classes, one of which is public equities, often not private equity or private capital. And retail investors, in order to buy into private companies, it's extremely difficult. And often you need a very, very high sophisticated investor income threshold to do it. Now, the problem there is that so much of the value creation cycle, it's kind of happening behind closed doors. It's happening in this private capital market where, you know, high net worth individuals, hedge funds, some institutional investors are getting a lot of that upside, And then the company's IPOing when it's already pretty mature. So just a couple of examples of that. Uber, one of, you know, one of the standout startup stories of the last 10 years, it IPOed at a valuation of $75 billion. I.e., a lot of the value creation, a lot of that kind of 10x, 100x upside had already been satisfied and had already been given to the private investors, to the venture capitalists. And it's only doubled since it IPO'd. Airbnb, $47 billion IPO valuation, it's now worth $75 billion. So yes, you can, you know, the pri— the retail investor can get involved, but often you get involved too late and you're carrying a pretty mature asset.

Yeah, no, that's super interesting because I think you, you You always get, whenever there's a big IPO, it's probably part of the mastermind tactics of marketing. You start to get these infographics of some of those aforementioned ones like Apple in the '80s or Amazon, and you're thinking, crikey, yeah, that would be a steal. And so you kind of naively, if not fully informed, think that, yeah, well, why can't these new companies equal that type of magnitude of gain? But you're absolutely right. And it just feels so utterly unfair in terms of how this works, or am I actually missing something here?

Yeah, I think it is. Well, it's unfair if you're on the losing side. I think it's very fair if you are a VC that gets access to all of this deal flow. I think the problem, private capital, private equity, private investing, the major downside as an investor, as an owner of those shares is that it's super liquid, right? So in public markets, you can buy and sell, you know, the bigger the stock, the more liquid it is. And that's all good. Whereas often when you invest in an early-stage company, you know your money is locked up for a number of years. And with good reason, because these companies are growing and they need long-term supportive investors. Now, what is happening is because these companies are staying private for longer, there is a greater requirement from investors, early-stage investors in those companies and founders to have a liquidity event before the IPO happens. So this is selling shares in the secondary market, but obviously there's no secondary market like there is for public equities. You know, it's very, very kind of who do I know? Can I phone up my broker? You know, will another high-net-worth individual buy my stake in SpaceX or whatever it might be. So these two initiatives, Jeremy Hunt on the UK side and Morgan Stanley on the US side, provide this kind of pre-IPO opportunity for early-stage investors and founders to get an exit event whilst also giving opportunity for non-traditional private capital investors get in on some of this value creation. So for example, in the UK, Jeremy Hunt outlined a couple of weeks, well, actually it was last week. He outlined an initiative called the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, PISCES, which basically allows pre-IPO companies, private companies, the opportunity to sell shares at periodic times during the year. So this is not a kind of always open liquid market. There are 6 or 7 times during the year where the secondary market for these private companies opens and founders and employees and investors can sell to pre-IPO investors. So it's kind of creating this very, very infant pre-IPO secondary market, which will set a lot of these companies, you know, will almost kind of prepare the ground for them to go through their IPO whilst being, whilst making the UK slightly more attractive, maybe from a founder and investor perspective. So if I'm a founder and I go, oh gosh, I don't have to wait until IPO, there is this Pisces thing that allows me in a few years' time to maybe sell down in the kind of private secondary market. This is, you know, I think it's a pretty sensible thing. Just one very quick note on this. This has been happening in the US since 2013, right?

So this is going to say it feels like a pretty natural evolution.

Yeah. I, you know, I call it like an IPO incubator. So pre-IPO mature companies selling down, you know, periodic times during the year. NASDAQ private markets allowed the trading of private company shares since 2013. 2013. So it does show that although we're trying to make the UK a little bit more attractive from a startup perspective and from an investor perspective, my gosh, we're still quite a long way behind the 8 ball.

Hmm. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put a poll on this episode and I want you to tell me, i.e., you the listener, what is the largest private company in the world? In terms of valuation that we know of. So yeah, I'll put a couple of options into a poll for you and you can have it, I guess.

Very good. Well, I won't give it away then. There's some whoppers that obviously, you know, I wouldn't mind getting a piece of, but by the time I can get a piece of it, i.e., it's gone public, a lot of the, you know, there'll be $100 billion companies, so I'm not going to get the upside. So just very quickly on the Morgan Stanley, on the other side of the pond. Morgan Stanley. So this is, I mean, this is a relatively interesting story, but it's just indicative of this structural change in the way that private and public markets are working. So Morgan Stanley offers private share trading. So Morgan Stanley is to, as of today, offering their wealth management clients the opportunity to invest in private companies through periodic secondary market sales. And I think again, this is relatively smart. Kevin Swan, the head of private market solutions at Morgan Stanley, says there's been increasing pressure over the past number of years to get into these companies while the value creation is occurring, rather than having to wait until the IPO. He goes on to say that this is actually quite a good time to do it in 2024, because remember in '22, '23, there was a pretty big gap between the valuation expectation of existing investors and what potentially new investors would value the company. There's been a lot of haircuts on venture-backed private company valuations, and that bid-offer spread, as it were, is narrowing and narrowing and narrowing in 2024. So it's probably quite a nice time to start this private markets transaction desk Product. Again, if I was to do this in the US, I need to have $200,000 of annual income, reasonably expect to maintain the same income in the next year, or possess a net worth of $1 million excluding my house, or hold a Series 7 license. So it still comes with the restrictions. The normal person on the street probably couldn't get access to these pre-IPO stocks, as is always the case.

Yeah. I think what I love about finance and just human ingenuity is the ability to come up with new ways of making money. It just seems like just when you thought, this is a business and this is what we do, there's another element of the process that gets almost monetized, if you like, for the benefit of, like you said, different different parties in, in this aspect. But I think it's just so interesting how these things evolve and change and adapt, and quite rightly so, because you say that the situation is different now in terms of the late stage at which these private companies are. So yeah, yeah.

And I, and I think this is why, this is why so many listeners to this podcast are interested in getting into careers in finance, because it is so multifaceted and there are so many different angles and so many different parts, and so, and still so much innovation that's going on. It is, you know, if you— it can take up your whole brain very, very easily in the way that maybe certain other industries can't.

Okay, so I've just jumped in the elevator at MS. I've just gone from the 5th, I've just jumped up to the 15th floor, and I've got out and everyone's talking Elon Musk. What's going on on this floor?

Yeah, so the story, the story that came out in Bloomberg a couple of days ago was that, uh, The banks that are stuck with X, formerly Twitter, debt hold refinancing talks with Musk. So let's take you back to the backstory. When Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter for whatever it was, $44 billion or $41 billion, they, uh, Elon Musk put together a syndicate, a bank syndicate of 7 banks led by Morgan Stanley. To lend Elon Musk $13 billion of what we call leveraged finance, lev-fin, which is a division within a bank, uh, to complete the acquisition of Twitter. Now, leveraged finance within banks is a, is historically a pretty lucrative area of the market. The way that it works is that these 7 banks, um, Morgan Stanley leading the syndicate, And taking a quarter of that $13 billion will lend the, will lend Elon Musk $13 billion, and then they will look to sell that debt to investors. They will look to sell down. They don't want to keep that debt, which has a relatively high core equity tier 1 capital requirements set against it because it's a bit risky. They will want to sell that down as quickly as possible. Now the problem, as we all know with Twitter or X, the problem is the valuation of Twitter almost immediately got massively slashed due to Elon Musk's slightly sclerotic ownership style, which meant that the value of this $13 billion of debt also decreased. So if I was to sell down that $13 billion within 6 months, of Elon Musk taking control of Twitter, I would've had to take a significant haircut on that $13 billion. In fact, in 2022, Morgan Stanley marked to market $876 million worth of leveraged loan losses, of which the Twitter stake was quite a big one. I, let's not get rid of it, but these banks have come together and said, let's hold onto this debt. Usually we would sell this down. I know it's annoying to hold onto this debt because you need to post a lot of capital against it, and it's not really part of our business model, but we think that in 12 months, 18 months, 24 months' time, this debt is going to become more attractive to investors and we won't have to incur the actual losses that we would have to if we sold down today. So they've come together and said, look, all right, we're holding this debt. We all agreed to hold this debt, you know, so it's not, it's not, you know, one bank, HSBC, can go off and sell its portion. They said, look, we are going to hold this debt together and we are going to wait for a time to sell down. Now what's happening now is Morgan Stanley is leading negotiations to refinance this $13 billion of debt, which could— this is really interesting— which could reduce the cost of debt, i.e., the interest paid by X on the debt, because it makes it less risky for banks and therefore investors to hold because the chance of default is lowered. You know, if I'm paying 10% interest on my debt, You know, I might default because I've got a lot of debt servicing. I've gotta pay a lot of interest. If my interest is only 5%, then my default risk goes down. Right now, this is interesting because what the banks have clearly discussed is we are happy to take a lower return, i.e., a lower interest rate in exchange for the lower risk associated withholding this debt and the greater likelihood of being able to sell this debt on it, you know, to investors in a couple of years' time. So it's a really interesting insight into the way that banks think, risk versus reward, you know, capital versus liabilities versus, you know, it's very, very interesting.

Yeah. I mean, you can imagine, turn the clock back 2 years ago, when Musk first picked up the phone and said, right, I need 13-odd billion, they would have been chomping at the bit. This is going to be the best kind of income we're ever going to make, only for them. As you said, a lot has changed since then. What could be Musk's input into this? I mean, I think we've lightly touched on this before, maybe with Piers and I, where we've talked about Musk engineering that he wants to hold Tesla's management feet to the fire so he can get an extra 10% uptick, which just so happens to fill a void of a large financing gap he has with the Twitter acquisition. So can Musk do anything here to influence their decision-making that, that could be preferential to him in any way?

Yeah, I mean, so the, the story— I think the story from Musk's perspective, he came out in October and said, look, banks are not going to lose money on this debt. He kind of made that statement that, you know, the banks have supported me, I will turn X around and you're not going to lose money. And this is part of the reason why the banks are still holding this $13 billion worth of debt. So I think, you know, Musk probably, I would say that Musk is a man of integrity and he's a man that sticks to his word, but actually maybe I'll kind of, I'll row back on that comment. This could be that Musk is probably saying, look, stay with me. I've got to clear a lot of dead weight within the company. I've got to reposition the business model. You've seen me do it a number of times, banks. So just hold onto the debt and I'll make it worth your while. He's probably, by the way, if this thing does go extremely south, he's not going to make these banks whole. He's not a charity case. He's not going to go, oh no, I said I'd pay you. I said you're not going to lose money, so you're not. Let me get out my checkbook. But he is putting his name and to an extent his reputation on the line with these 7 banks.

So the balance being then is that if I'm on the bank side and Musk is telling me, look, how's handle this situation? SpaceX is coming down the pipe and I want to have you guys involved, and that's your big payday. So just chill, let's keep, keep hold of it, restructure it, and let's, let's business as usual.

100%. And yeah, so Elon Musk, I think, with all of these banks, probably has pretty significant leverage, uh, and quite big wallet sizes, uh, across his other interests and companies and things like that. And he probably just from a— he probably isn't someone that you'd want to get on the wrong side of, um, because he is very vocal and does have a very big following. So I think, yeah, it's a little bit of a poison chalice getting into bed with Elon Musk from a bank perspective. You want to tread carefully, I think.

All right, well look, let's move the show on. Two more to go. Let's talk Reddit. I know there's an update on their IPO status.

Yeah, I mean, so we covered this, we've covered this a couple of times on Deal of the Week and also on the podcast. And the reason why we keep covering it is because it's an interesting story. So a little bit of, again, a little bit of reminder. Reddit, the, uh, the online community forum company. I'm just actually, I'm just going to take what it says from its IPO prospectus. Uh, Reddit's mission is to bring community belonging and empowerment to everyone in the world. Well, that—

wow. Well, well, I think you might have to sort out internet connection to several countries around planet Earth. But yeah, absolutely.

Total addressable market, 8 billion people. You know, not bad, is it? So, so I actually put out a piece earlier on this week trying to give, you know, I've given a bit of a bear case for Reddit. It's loss-making, it's relatively subscale relative to the big social media players. You know, how is it going to make money? I put out a bit of a flip side. So Reddit's IPO price was coming in at around I think $5.5 to $6.5 billion market capitalization. And I was trying to create a bit of a bull story in the Deal of the Week on Monday. I was like, look, you know, it is the 10th most visited website in the world.

I couldn't believe that when I read it.

It's crazy, isn't it? It's, yeah, it's got 73 million average daily active users, which is, which is not bad. 267 active weekly unique users. It's not bad. And it's just signed a $60 million AI licensing deal with Google where Google can access the treasure trove of Reddit's and subreddit's data in order to boost its AGI models. And this is something, by the way, $60 million. I think that this is, you know, this is small fry. I think this, it could probably get 2 or 3 times as much. I think they're just proving the market. Remember, this all goes to their bottom line as well. It's just getting access to the database, right? It's not, they have to create a load of new products. So there's a lot of, yeah, I'd say there's a little bit more bull story than bear story in my own mind as I work through this IPO. But the story that really grabbed my attention a couple of days ago as this IPO gets closer and closer and closer is that the Reddit Meme stock forum users threaten to bet against its IPO. I love this. There's something very kind of ancient Rome about this. The kind of, you know, the kind of peasant revolt or something. So WallStreetBets, which is the biggest Reddit thread, 15 million users.

Is it actually the biggest?

Yeah, it is. It is. I think Taylor Swift might be second. Voted to boost a forum post about shorting the company. By the way, they usually are very bullish WallStreetBets and they usually like going long. You know, so they went long GameStop and AMC in order to stick it to the short seller hedge funds. So it was a kind of like, all right, you know, okay. The consistency's not really there. Although I don't think we expect a consistency from from something like the WallStreetBets. But yeah, look, they are, you know, there's a decent sub-community within Reddit that's basically saying, one, let's short it because we don't really believe its revenue model, its revenue story. It's not profitable. It's not growing quickly enough. It's fundamentally not a good enough company to invest in, but they're shorting it, point two, because they believe that the user experience is going to get worse. Now, this is super interesting from a kind of broader perspective. What happens when a much-loved product, online community forum, goes public and starts getting real challenges to its revenue model, real challenges to its growth prospects, quarterly reporting cycles, activist investors, I'll tell you what happens. The product probably gets worse. And this is what all the Redditors are getting worried about. I don't want to be spammed with advertising. I don't want to get blocked out of certain features due to paywalls. You know, this thing is going to get worse for me, and therefore I don't think, you know, I think I'm going to short the stock.

I love the solution. If you can't have it, I'm just gonna kill it.

Can't have it, short it. And I think this lends itself to— I was reading a very, very good article the other day in the FT by a guy called Cory Doctorow. I don't know if you've heard of this bloke. He coined the term, and excuse my language, but he coined the term the enshittification of everything. And what this means, what he's saying is Due to the pressure to make money and the pressure that comes with the hypergrowth of the likes of Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and all this kind of stuff, these products that we loved and we got loads of value out of have started, well, not just started, have become A, much worse because we're just spammed with all of this advertising stuff and B, have become a lot more insidious because they're stealing our data and they're just, they, you know, they're just, they're just exploiting us. So he calls it the enshittification. Like everything online is becoming worse because of this business model. And I think this is what we're potentially seeing with Reddit, you know, independent, much loved, you know, place to kind of hang out with people online. If it goes public, is it, is it going to be enshittified?

Well, Sam Altman just needs his money out so he can pursue his next project.

He needs $7 trillion. We're going to talk about that in a second. We're going to talk about that in a second. So yeah, I just, I think it's just a, it's a, it's an interesting story. It's one to follow from an IPO perspective. And obviously if it flies, then there are other IPO candidates waiting in the wings, but it's also a bigger story about, all right, you know, what happens when a company IPOs? And what are the dangers in terms of the quality of product? You can't, it's very hard if you could see a company and it's got all of these different stakeholders, it's got shareholders, it's got customers, it's got employees, it's got suppliers, it's got the government. Very hard to serve every master. And when you become public, your main master becomes the shareholder. Not necessarily the customer. And this is kind of what we're seeing play out in Reddit.

I'm assuming, um, because there's no precedence, there isn't a defined tactic that the bank will deploy to counteract the, this kind of behavioral notion of the, the short sellers that are sitting there waiting to hit it when it goes public, because this sort of thing hasn't happened before, right?

Yeah. The only thing you can do is fill a, you know, as you're going out to IPO, you fill an order book with really high quality institutional investors and have a decent lock-in length so that there isn't actually much free float or much liquidity for the retail investors to buy on the IPO. So even if they wanted to, and even if they can get, you know, 3% of the IPOs actually actively traded, Well, it's not really going to do that much. So that would be my strategy. And by the way, Reddit's got, you know, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America, all on the ticket. So they know what they're doing.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, look, final one. And this is one I haven't been following. So I'm interested to hear what this is about, but Alibaba and there's some AI action. So what's this about?

Yeah. So Alibaba has just made its second investment into age into an AGI company in the last 2 weeks actually. So they've just invested in a company, an AI startup called Minimax, $600 million investment at a $2.5 billion valuation. And this adds to the, I think again, $600 or $700 million investment in a company called Moonshot AI, which happened at the end of last week. So few things to talk about here. The first is from an Alibaba perspective. So Alibaba has been absolutely crushed by the Chinese government over, by the Chinese National People's Congress over the last few years. The kind of headline story is the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, was getting a bit big for his boots. Firstly, they blocked The Ant Financial IPO a couple of years ago, Jack Ma effectively went into hiding, if you remember, for 6+ months and came back a much chastened individual.

I'm going to love it when he's on his deathbed and he actually spills the beans of what happened over those 6 months.

I remember it's a bit like the Taylor Swift flight trackers that you get on Twitter, on X these days. There was a Jack Ma flight tracker, like where had he been? Anyway, so Alibaba has been massively, massively chastened and the share price has been destroyed over the last couple of years. It's 65% down in the last 5 years. You know, compare that to the equivalent US company, which is probably Amazon, which has been rocketing over the last 5 years. And you're thinking, all right, what's going on here? Now, Alibaba historically has been extremely successful investing in technology companies that support the infrastructure and the architecture of Alibaba's marketplace and its super app and things like that. But it basically hasn't invested in any companies throughout the last 3 years because of the government's oversight. So what is interesting here is they come out with 2 big investments in the last 2 weeks and the Chinese government is actually endorsing the new CEOs, co-CEOs, Joseph Tsai and, uh, Eddie Wu. Uh, the China internet overseer is basically saying, look, these guys are good people. We are desperate to get to speed with, you know, artificial generative intelligence. Alibaba is a key player in this and we support them doing these investments. Chinese got, you know, China is very different from the US. If you get the stamp of approval from the China internet overseer, that is going to give you great confidence that you can go out and do some pretty significant things. So from an Alibaba perspective, this is them just, I'd say this is them starting to wake up from being out in the cold. For a couple of years from a China perspective and making a couple of pretty big waves.

Yeah, there's probably two timely catalysts, one being the arms race for AI.

Yeah.

And then the other being the current macro climate in China. And so nothing sharpens and focuses the mind and unifies what otherwise could be competing forces than saying, right, we've got a greater enemy now presenting in front of us. We need to unite and come together and work together and complement one another rather than before, a few years back when Jack Ma was becoming a stud.

Yeah, somewhat of a risk. Yeah, I totally agree. And I agree with the arms race analogy and it's an interesting an interesting comparison between a quote-unquote control economy, and China is not a control economy anymore, but under a communist system, a control economy is what you go for. And there are still elements of it there versus obviously the kind of entrepreneurial spirit of the US economy. And with regards to AGI, the US has had a massive head start, right? You know, in terms of amounts of funding, in terms of, you know, In terms of NVIDIA, in terms of OpenAI, in terms of Anthropic, the US is miles ahead of China. And it's probably got there because of this kind of, because of this entrepreneurial spirit, the availability of capital. China's probably now playing catch-up and going, hey, the control economy elements of China need to start directing towards AGI. Hence the China Internet Overseer going, by the way, we support this and we want to back you. They're quite a long way behind because these investments are not massive, right? You know, $600 million is a lot of money, but we've seen the size of investments in the like of O'Hare and Anthropic and OpenAI. And this leads me to my favorite story, Sam Altman. He loves a headline almost as much as Elon Musk.

Oh, it's clash of the egos. That's what that is.

No, obviously he's being sued by Elon Musk at the moment. So, you know, again, get them in a get them in a ring, see who wins. But, you know, he said that he's seeking up to $7 trillion to reshape business of chips and AI semiconductors and AI. I mean, come on, that's ridiculous. We're going, you know, I'm already blown away by some of these valuations in early stage AGI companies. I'm blown away by NVIDIA's valuation as well. Where's this $7 trillion number come from?

So, so, so that has to be framing for a future project or ambition where the $7 trillion is like a moot point. That doesn't matter. It's not $7 trillion. It just opens up then doors and conversations with, let's say, sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East. Mm-hmm. In order for you to have dialogue then and then an exchange, and then you might secure $100 billion, whatever it might be. Like the $7 trillion, I think is just like the selling point to initiate the conversation because everyone's in this euphoric kind of high on AI.

Yeah. I like someone tried to break down that $7 trillion and they were like, you can buy, you can buy every data center, every advanced semiconductor fabrication plant, every AI company And Nvidia for that $7 trillion and the steelworks and the utilities that go behind that. You know, you can buy all of that. So maybe that's what you want. But it does remind me, to your point on the Middle East, it does remind me quite a lot of SoftBank's Vision Fund, the Masayoshi Son going out and saying, we are going to blow venture capital out the water. You think a billion-dollar fund is big? We're going to raise a $100 billion fund. And obviously we've covered this on the podcast. That had significant inflationary ramifications for the venture capital industry. So I just wonder what's going, you know, this seems like a kind of vision fund moment. And as you say, he's definitely positioning, he's a smart guy, definitely positioning for something else. But yeah, this headline took me by surprise.

Yeah. All right. Well, look, we are going to wrap it up there and end the episode. So thank you very much as always, Steven. Any questions at all for us, just drop us a a comment, I know you can do so on Spotify. I think on Apple, if you just drop us a review, you can include a comment in there. That would be cool as well. So until next week, take care, uh, and yeah, have a good week ahead.

Thank you, Ant.